Les Sauvages Am?ricains
Subtitle: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press; University of North Carolina Press
Published: August 6, 1997
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 336
ISBN-13: 9780807846520
Subjects: Colonization & independence; Cultural studies; Indigenous peoples; Literary studies: 16th to 18th centuries; Native American; History and criticism; Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775; Literary Criticism; Literature - Classics / Criticism; French; Sociology; USA; Indians in literature; American - General; Ethnic Studies - Native American Studies; Algonquin; Iroquois; American Northeast; John Smith; Samuel de Champlain; Pierre Francois-Xavier Charlevoix; Joseph-Francois Lafitau; Baron de Lahontan; French explorers; French ethnographers; anthropology; cultural studies; literary methodologies; Virginia; New England; Canadian literature; History / Native American; Literary Criticism & Collections / French; Literary Criticism-American - General; American literature; American - Native American; Historiography; Indians of North America
First sentence: Thoreau often wished to create the impression that he spent more time in the woods than in the library, and perhaps it is because the opposite was true that he characterizes these obscure works as a forest, a surrogate wilderness.
Description: Algonquin and Iroquois natives of the American Northeast were described in great detail by colonial explorers who ventured into the region in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Beginning with the writings of John Smith and Samuel de Champlain, Gordon Sayre analyzes French and English accounts of Native Americans to reveal the rhetorical codes by which their cultures were represented and the influence that these images of Indians had on colonial and modern American society.

By emphasizing the work of Pierre Francois-Xavier Charlevoix, Joseph-Francois Lafitau, and Baron de Lahontan, among others, Sayre highlights the important contribution that French explorers and ethnographers made to colonial literature.